After reading articles about the swappiness value I changed it to 10.I see that while playing Castleville now I can surf internet better and I can open other applications such as Libre office quicker than before.Is there anything wrong about changing this value in the long term? I made this change temporary.If there is nothing wrong I will make it permanent.Thanks in advance. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS using XFCE Memory 2GB Pentium dual core 2.50Ghz x2 Please do not tell me to add RAM because my motherboard does not support more than 2 GB of RAM.Asus P5 GCMX-1333
Depending your hardware, you may hit a "brick wall of swapping" if your RAM runs out, as lots of stuff suddenly gets paged out. That's more with very low swappiness values though, e.g. 1 or 2; and will probably not happen with 2 GB of RAM.
I have only casually read about swap, but I was under the impression that swap isn't used much anymore in modern OS's- it was more important in older hardware & OSs. cet, can you link some of those articles you were reading? Thanks!
I have 2GB RAM and changing the value to 30 made a difference while playing flash games online on Facebook. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq#What_is_swappiness_and_how_do_I_change_it.3F This is the Ubuntu official documentation about swap
please check this http://askubuntu.com/questions/103915/how-do-i-configure-swappiness 30 seems good value to me it make programs open fast but same time you lack disk cache which effect some some things slow like for example hibernate if you use hibernate it slow on low swapping value i guess that why they put it default 60 not 30 but in case you dont use hibernate ...etc 30 is very good and safe value. please correct me if i am wrong so far i get this out of swapping............ in simple way although its pretty deep subject. hmmm .......... expect like mrk put more light on it.
Depends on the kernel version: http://lwn.net/Articles/467328/ Edit: unless you mean "no changes to swappiness in particular." In which case I'd still beg to differ, at least for laptop users. I find that, with default settings, laptops with lots of RAM and slow hard drives tend to page out program memory before physical RAM is even half full - even though shrinking the filesystem cache hurts less. (And one could run with no swap, but that's dangerous because of the Linux OOM killer. Why Linux actively kills processes, instead of making malloc() fail and return null like every other OS on Earth, I have no idea.)
